I Was Here
Draw on street view, others can find your drawings
Details
- External ID
- 47319255
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- I Was Here
- Website domain
- washere.live
- Launched
- March 10, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 67
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.8714637146371463
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
Description
Hey HN, I made a site where you can draw on street-level panoramas. Your drawings persist and other people can see them in real time.Strokes get projected onto the 3D panorama so they wrap around buildings and follow the geometry, not just a flat overlay. Uses WebGL2 for rendering, Mapillary for the street imagery.The idea is for it to become a global canvas, anyone can leave a mark anywhere and others stumble onto it.
Enrichment
- Theme
- 3D modeling and visual design tools
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- —
- Audience
- B2C
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- draw annotations on google street view maps
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
Partial A basic canvas overlay is easy, but projecting 2D freehand drawn strokes onto 3D spherical panoramas with geometric wrapping and real-time multiplayer synchronization requires advanced graphics math.
What it would actually take: The application uses WebGL2/Three.js integrated with Mapillary's API and camera depth/mesh data, alongside a real-time sync backend (WebSockets via Supabase or PartyKit). The hard part is raycasting screen strokes onto the panorama's underlying depth mesh or 3D point cloud so strokes conform to architectural surfaces rather than resting on a flat overlay sphere, then storing and syncing those 3D vector paths efficiently.
Discussion
20 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: Margin.at, Global satellite view drawing tool (mentioned as alternative)
Concerns raised: Limited number of locations (~2,000 curated spots), Moderation challenges with spam and trolls at scale, Overrepresentation of highways and bridges in Mapillary data, Discovery/UX confusion - users unclear how to draw, Friction with premium requirement for drawing
Feature requests: Expand to more/all locations globally, Satellite view instead of just street view, Required authentication to prevent trolls, Automated moderation at scale, Better curation of panorama coverage
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 95 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #24 of 96 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 120 days after the earliest competitor.
- Street Section Studio · ph · 2026-09-29 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.51
- Search London StreetView panoramas by text · hn · 2025-11-20 · 39 upvotes · similarity 0.47
- Add grid on image: Drawing Grid Maker · ph · 2026-09-16 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.47
- Contour Foundry · ph · 2026-09-15 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.44
- mapthis — Make a place yours · ph · 2026-09-08 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.43
- Drawing Suggestions · ph · 2026-09-13 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.42
- Soft Edge · ph · 2026-09-30 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.42
- Reverse perspective camera for OpenGL (Three.js) · hn · 2025-11-10 · 52 upvotes · similarity 0.41